ISSN:
2181-3906
2023
International scientific journal
«MODERN SCIENCE АND RESEARCH»
VOLUME 2 / ISSUE 9 / UIF:8.2 / MODERNSCIENCE.UZ
140
DEVELOPING SUMMARY WRITING SKILL IN ACADEMIC WRITING
Shodieva Maftunabonu Adizovna
Osiyo Xalqaro Universiteti ingliz tili o’qituvchisi
shodiyevamaftunabonu@gmail.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8346813
Abstract.
Summary writing is an essential skill in academic writing as it helps condense and
present key points, ideas, and arguments from a source text in a concise and clear manner. It
requires reading comprehension, analytical thinking, and the ability to capture the main ideas
while omitting unnecessary details. Effective summary writing helps readers quickly grasp the
main points of a text and facilitates critical thinking. To develop summary writing skill in academic
writing, it is important to first thoroughly understand the source text. This involves carefully
reading and analyzing the text to identify the main points, supporting details, and any underlying
arguments or perspectives. By highlighting or annotating important sections, such as topic
sentences, the writer can better identify the main ideas and key information to include in the
summary.
Key words:
academic writing, summary writing, effective summary.
РАЗВИТИЕ НАВЫКОВ СОСТАВЛЕНИЯ РЕЗЮМЕ В АКАДЕМИЧЕСКОМ
ПИСЬМЕ
Аннотация.
Написание резюме является важным навыком академического письма,
поскольку оно помогает кратко и ясно представить ключевые моменты, идеи и аргументы
исходного текста. Это требует понимания прочитанного, аналитического мышления и
способности улавливать основные идеи, опуская при этом ненужные детали.
Эффективное написание резюме помогает читателям быстро понять основные моменты
текста и способствует критическому мышлению. Чтобы развить навыки написания
резюме в академическом письме, важно сначала полностью понять исходный текст. Это
предполагает внимательное чтение и анализ текста, чтобы определить основные
моменты, подтверждающие детали, а также любые основные аргументы или точки
зрения. Выделяя или комментируя важные разделы, например тематические предложения,
автор может лучше определить основные идеи и ключевую информацию для включения в
резюме.
Ключевые слова:
Научные работы, написание заключение, эффективное резюме.
Introduction
In linguistics, the ability of writing a good summary has it’s own strategies and EFL
learners should include these strategies in academic writing. Summarizing texts is giving a short
description and it demonstrates the clearly understanding the text. The main goal of summary
writing is providing accurately as full as possible sense of original text but in more condensed
forms. Having a good summary writing ability means both reading and writing skills can be well-
developed. The utility of summary writing is considered as a key point in an effective academic
writing and in an academic arena summarization is believed to enhance reading and writing
comprehension. The purpose of this research is to investigate summary strategies and instructions
that can improve and develop the summary writing abilities of EFL learners.
ISSN:
2181-3906
2023
International scientific journal
«MODERN SCIENCE АND RESEARCH»
VOLUME 2 / ISSUE 9 / UIF:8.2 / MODERNSCIENCE.UZ
141
According to recent scholarly traditions and the daily observations in the article by
Hosseinpur (2015) there is an investigation to find out cognitive developments that are occured
while summery writing instructions are received by Iranian EFL learners. They are asked to write
five summaries during their eight week of session and their works are analyzed in term of the
selection of topic sentence, sentence combination, paraphrasing, invention, deletion, major
verbatim copying and minor verbatim copying. The findings show that topic sentence selection,
sentence combination and deletion were not challenging for them rather than generalization,
invention and syntactic transformation. Besides, major verbatim copying was decreasing but minor
verbatim copying was still appearing. Indeed, Sung (2014) confirmed that summary writing
instruction can lead to improvement of summary performance. Moreover, the participants of this
survey who were thirty eight university freshmen had six years of compulsory English education.
Process of Summary Writing
Kintsch and Van Dijik (1978) suggested that there are three processes which are involved
in a summary writing: comprehending the original text, condense the main ideas and reproduce
them in own words and it requires to identify the meaningful prepositions and restate them
coherently. Moreover, summary writing skill is considered to be difficult not only for EFL learners
but also for native students of English language and for this reason summarization is one of the
most challenging and demanding activity in academic learning.
The authors Cindy and Ronald (2000) state that there are some students who use the
software summarization tool on specific content which they find it easier to use and identify
important information and it seems to enjoy them while having challenges. It is very clear that the
summarization tool are helpful for students to solve the specific problems related with their
summaries. However, students feel a need for the instructions and strategies to be taught in detail
as software tools can not give them specific information instruction of summarizing. Moreover,
integrating summarization software into classroom gives an opportunity of discussing planning
and writing a summary.
The main aim of this study is to mention that not only written material but also software
tools can help to develop summary writing skill.
Teaching Summarization
Summarizing provides with an important contribution to students in transferring and
understanding information to long-term memory and researchers show that one who are successful
in reading can have a good summary skill. Brown and Day (1983) prove that teaching students
summarizing is not asking them to write summaries at all and it is important to teach them how to
do and what strategies to use it. The author claims that in developing summarizing skill, analyzing
both bad and good summaries of text and also doing exercises in order to complete missed
summary texts before to start the process of summarization will provide with a good and concrete
summary. The purpose of this research is understanding new information and memorize it for
academic success as summarizing is the learning strategy which increases both memory and
understanding.
On the other hand, Khoshnevis
(2015) investigates teaching effective summarization of
text as a cognitive strategy on achievement of students’ writing comprehension. English
undergraduates of University of Tonekabon are involved in this study and they are divided into
control and experimental groups. Both two groups are observed their summary writing ability and
ISSN:
2181-3906
2023
International scientific journal
«MODERN SCIENCE АND RESEARCH»
VOLUME 2 / ISSUE 9 / UIF:8.2 / MODERNSCIENCE.UZ
142
the results show that the instruction of summary strategies has a significant role on the participants
writing comprehension. Furthermore, the author suggests that teaching strategies of summarization
empowers students’ writing comprehension ability.
In this term Khazaal (2019) indicates two months implementation which is applied to
twenty Iraqi postgraduate English as a foreign language learners. The group of participants are
carried out in a pre-post-test model of summarizing and participants are conducted in a pre-test on
summary writing a week before it applied and they are given five different passages. The same
selected passages are given to post-test and they are asked to summarize given passages in 45
minutes and overall, the results report that summarizing strategy has an important effect on learners
in academic writing skills.
Al-Badi (2015) demonstrates that ESL learners can find to organize their information and
ideas challenging to summarize because of the lack of knowledge. It is a responsible task to teach
students how to write summaries so some teachers find it boring to explain summarizing and they
try to avoid as far as possible. In an academic setting summary skills are identified as crucial
factors because students are often asked to produce summary assignments. Summarizing strategy
in writing encourages students to develop their steps in academic writing starting with a pen ending
with an updating social media. It is a way of informing to reader what is the book about. Spack
(1988) mentioned that as summarizing one of the effective strategy of writing it requires learners
to concentrate on the main ideas of the text and choose specific information without deleting the
key points. Additionally, it is a complex activity which has a major part on academic experience.
Summarizing skill helps English language learners to develop their critical thinking skills and
improves the ability to evaluate details in text by resorting important details from unimportant
ones. According to Jones (2007), there are twelve most important benefits of learning and
developing summarizing strategies: to built comprehension to reduce confusion, to find the main
key points, to save time, to construct personal meaning, to discern essential ideas, to improve
memory, discovering understanding and remembering and so on.
What makes summary writing more effective? Bacinschii
(2018) listed six main methods
that makes one a successful summary writer and they are: gathering the data from the title, identify
the place of essay as it can be literary, scholarly or argumentative. Then the next step is to take
notes from the tone of the pieces and at the end to identify certain notion which seem to be repeated
throughout. The author claims that after finished writing a summary students should reread their
summaries and make sure that they accurately represented the author’s main points and ideas.
Summarizing without plagiarizing
In an academic writing not only EFL learners can find summarizing difficult without
plagiarism. Bacinschii (2018) points out that the main requirements to any summarizing is it’s
paper originality and the easiest way to find what to write is to use someone’s experience. In order
to make the work complete students are supposed to make up a plan and a clue of thinking and the
author responds the question how to summarize without plagiarizing by four key point or steps:
Step 1. At the beginning the writer have to read the reference attentively and comprehend
what the work is about and understand the information to be able to put in own words.
Step 2. Students have to write an introduction of the paper and decide what to share and
make it clear to readers. No matter from what book or website they use the date they must give the
source with quotation marks.
ISSN:
2181-3906
2023
International scientific journal
«MODERN SCIENCE АND RESEARCH»
VOLUME 2 / ISSUE 9 / UIF:8.2 / MODERNSCIENCE.UZ
143
Step 3. To write a plot not looking into the reference material. In this way they can avoid
plagiarism in text. To remember something more important they can read the entire reference again
tehn write their own version one more time.
Step 4. After the last sentence they should place a citation and point out the author’s name
and the source to avoid plagiarism.
The most significant role of summarizing is to understanding and memorize the
information to long-term and distinguish main ideas then express the data by using own words.
Conclusion
To sum up, from all four skills, writing is one of the significant skill especially in an
academic writing such in colleges, schools and institution. Mainly for ESN and EFL learners
summary writing is the most important and developing this skill is needed to enhance their
comprehension skill. Though it is considered as a complex academic activity it should be
understood and realized but not plagiarized. Finally, all researches on developing summary writing
skill were conducted on university students and therefore results were different according to
different kind of universities which had absolutely different English pronunciation. Enser (2020)
reports that a considerable amount of time is required to write a successful summary because to
find important key points and deleting unimportant information compared to other strategies
examine students to engage all cognitive processes. Despite the difference of findings was not so
significant there is an evidence that experimental teaching summarizing groups were able to help
learners to use effective strategies in the summary writing process in text.
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ISSN:
2181-3906
2023
International scientific journal
«MODERN SCIENCE АND RESEARCH»
VOLUME 2 / ISSUE 9 / UIF:8.2 / MODERNSCIENCE.UZ
144
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